Marketing Services
What’s the difference between your customized marketing coaching and your online marketing game plan?
The customized marketing coaching covers all aspects of coaching based on what your business needs. You could use the coaching hours to help you create a full marketing plan for your business, solve a specific challenge, get training on some aspect of marketing you want to learn better, guidance on how to use inbound marketing effectively for your business or a combination of many areas. You choose the areas you want to focus on.
The Online Marketing Game Plan is designed to create a full web presence for your business over a six month period while providing coaching and mentoring to you or someone in your organization. This service focuses on creating a mobile responsive website, fully optimized social media profiles and directory listings. Once your web presence is in place, you can then decide whether to do the marketing yourself or outsource to a full-service marketing agency.
The Online Marketing Game Plan is designed to create a full web presence for your business over a six month period while providing coaching and mentoring to you or someone in your organization. This service focuses on creating a mobile responsive website, fully optimized social media profiles and directory listings. Once your web presence is in place, you can then decide whether to do the marketing yourself or outsource to a full-service marketing agency.
How do your coaching services differ from your online marketing services?
The online marketing service packages are targeted at small to medium-sized businesses that want to partner with a marketing agency and outsource their marketing activities. By outsourcing some or all of your marketing to us, you can spend more time on other things in your business. The packages are customized to each business’s needs and are designed for consistent activity each month.
Marketing Coaching
What’s the difference between a coach, consultant, advisor or mentor?
A marketing coach works with you to develop your marketing strategy and then educates you on how to execute the strategy with your resources. A marketing coach is your advisor, confidant and mentor, encouraging you to take action and stay consistent.
A marketing consultant will also work with you to develop your marketing strategy, but a consultant will spend time doing the work. A consultant will often work with your business over a longer time period usually on a retainer and will execute the activities for you.
A marketing consultant will also work with you to develop your marketing strategy, but a consultant will spend time doing the work. A consultant will often work with your business over a longer time period usually on a retainer and will execute the activities for you.
How do I know if I need coaching, consulting, or both?
Many small businesses will need both marketing coaching and consulting at times. For daily execution, coaching can help you stay focused on getting results. For larger projects, such as website development or pay per click advertising, you may be better off engaging an expert to do the work and deliver results.
Marketing Basics
When does my business need marketing?
The answer to that question is “all the time”.
I often notice that many small business owners treat marketing like something that can be turned on and off or as an expense not an investment. One indicator of this is that I get really busy in a down economy because businesses decide they probably should market to try and find new customers.
The good news is these businesses seek out help, looking for someone to guide them in their efforts so they achieve success. But for every one business that engages a true marketing expert, there are many that try to mix and match disparate marketing activities hoping their business will get busy again.
Unfortunately, hope is not a marketing strategy and that belief can be the demise of many small businesses.
Effective small business marketing is not an activity to be done only when things get quiet, but is a process that should be constantly and consistently happening in your business, making your business more visible to those looking for your products and services.
Benefits of continuous marketing:
I often notice that many small business owners treat marketing like something that can be turned on and off or as an expense not an investment. One indicator of this is that I get really busy in a down economy because businesses decide they probably should market to try and find new customers.
The good news is these businesses seek out help, looking for someone to guide them in their efforts so they achieve success. But for every one business that engages a true marketing expert, there are many that try to mix and match disparate marketing activities hoping their business will get busy again.
Unfortunately, hope is not a marketing strategy and that belief can be the demise of many small businesses.
Effective small business marketing is not an activity to be done only when things get quiet, but is a process that should be constantly and consistently happening in your business, making your business more visible to those looking for your products and services.
Benefits of continuous marketing:
- You build awareness and brand differentiation for your business by being visible to your prospects and clients;
- You establish a solid reputation for your business by marketing your expertise through articles and blogging;
- You distinguish your business from the “competition” by staying visible and promoting your expertise;
- You can evaluate your marketing efforts by the results you are seeing in your business. If they work, keep doing them; if they don’t work try something else.
Marketing takes time to take effect and when you shut something down, it is really hard to kick it back up. Plus stopping and starting marketing doesn’t give you enough data to know whether something is working or not. The key is to put a marketing effort in motion and let it run, evaluating the outcome and tweaking the campaign when need be. Starting and stopping marketing is guaranteed to give you less than stellar results.
Build marketing into your business strategy so that it becomes second nature and ensures your business stays visible to your clients. If you don’t feel you can do it yourself, find a reputable marketing agency to help. An investment in marketing your business can be small but the payoff can be substantial.
Why do I need a marketing plan?
Without a written marketing plan, your business is making decisions on the fly. This results in disjointed marketing efforts, wasting time and resources on activities that may or may not work for your business. When your plan is written down, you become more focused. Committing your goals, strategies and activities to a written document is the only way to avoid losing sight of what we want to achieve – turning our ideas into proven reality.
Is having a marketing system important to the success of my marketing activities?
If you want your marketing to be effective, you need to treat marketing as a process – a series of actions to achieve your particular marketing goal. But unless you create a marketing system, your marketing process could be inefficient and inconsistent, producing results that are less than you had hoped.
The key to implementing an effective marketing system is to ensure it aligns with your marketing plan and defines the steps you will take to implement a success inbound marketing funnel.
For more information on implementing a marketing system, read my blog post on Marketing System or Marketing Plan – Do You Need Both?
The key to implementing an effective marketing system is to ensure it aligns with your marketing plan and defines the steps you will take to implement a success inbound marketing funnel.
For more information on implementing a marketing system, read my blog post on Marketing System or Marketing Plan – Do You Need Both?
Marketing Tools
Why WordPress?
A website’s goal is to provide inbound leads and visibility for your business. To accomplish that goal, your website needs to continually deliver a pleasant user experience to those who are looking for your products and services.
WordPress provides robust functionality and ease of use features, making it the ideal choice for businesses that want to keep their website content up-to-date and relevant to their target market. This dynamic, open source software has evolved into an easy to use content management system, putting you in control of your content.
WordPress provides robust functionality and ease of use features, making it the ideal choice for businesses that want to keep their website content up-to-date and relevant to their target market. This dynamic, open source software has evolved into an easy to use content management system, putting you in control of your content.
Why does my website need to be mobile responsive?
As more people are visiting websites from their smartphones and tablets than web browsers, it is also important that your website be able to support a broad range of devices. In the latest Google algorithm, websites that do not support a mobile experience may lose rank in the Google search engine results.
Why should I have a self-hosted WordPress website?
If you want to use content marketing to help grow your business, you do need a self-hosted WordPress website on your own domain. A branded domain is a valuable asset of your business which helps it gain more visibility. When you host your website on someone else’s domain like WordPress.com, you do not own your web presence. Now most hosting companies provide 1 click install and upgrades for WordPress.
Why do I need a blog for my business?
Not all businesses will be able to support the requirements of having a blog, but businesses who do blog get more traffic to their website than those who don’t. A quality blog helps convert that traffic into leads while establishing your business as an authority in your industry.
Every time you publish a blog post, you increase your web presence by another page which creates one more opportunity for your business to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search.
Every time you publish a blog post, you increase your web presence by another page which creates one more opportunity for your business to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search.
Why do I need to do SEO on my website?
Optimizing your website is the process of ensuring your web pages can be found when someone is searching using the most relevant keyword phrases for your business. By taking the time to optimize each page and post on your website can have a huge impact on your organic traffic.
Getting your website organically ranking high in search engines is one of the most important aspects to your marketing plan. Traffic that comes from organic search engine results is extremely cost effective, providing a high ROI if that traffic converts into paying clients.
Getting your website organically ranking high in search engines is one of the most important aspects to your marketing plan. Traffic that comes from organic search engine results is extremely cost effective, providing a high ROI if that traffic converts into paying clients.
Do I need an email service provider and if so, which one?
If you want to email a large number of recipients, you must use an email service provider. With the amount of spam being sent, many ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will block emails that have too many recipients in the cc or bcc fields. In order to ensure your emails reach your intended audience, you should signup for a reputable email service provider, build your email list on that provider and use it to email to your list.
I recommend MailChimp for a couple of reasons:
I recommend MailChimp for a couple of reasons:
- It’s free to use for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.
- It supports an RSS campaign, making it easy for you to send your blog posts to your list via email automatically. Only a few email service providers have this feature.
- It supports mobile devices so your emails look good when read on a smartphone.
- It now has an autoreponder feature in the free account that enables you to send a series of emails to people based on what they signed up for.
You can sign up for an account simply by visiting the MailChimp website.
If you would like to understand the differences between email marketing and marketing automation, check out my blog post Marketing Automation vs Email Marketing.